In my previous articles delving into photographs from the ARF Archives, we saw some familiar and unfamiliar visuals from our history and culture over the past century and more. One clear takeaway is that the Armenian people have never lived in a vacuum. Empires have passed over the lands where Armenians have lived. Large-scale conflicts have reverberated among the Armenian people, not least of which the Genocide during the First World War. Armenians themselves have also participated in and helped shape fashions and trends around them – including, not coincidentally, the spread of photography in the Middle East.
Unsurprisingly, then, there are subjects among the photographs in the archives outside of exclusively Armenian circles.
ARF Photo Archives – Box 1, Photo 15
For example, here we have a group photo of Turkish military personnel. Below, more specifically, is one Mustafa Vefa Bey who, it says on the back of the photo, was a spy assassinated in Tiflis (Tbilisi).
ARF Photo Archives – Box 10, Photo 40
The picture below is a bit more mysterious, as it is merely labelled “Տաճկական Հիւպատոս” in Armenian on the back – “Turkish Consul.”
ARF Photo Archives – Box 3, Photo 186
This picture does not match the stereotypical visualizations of Turks in Armenian discourse (for which, see the images above). There is something domestic and avuncular about this man, his dog and a granddaughter, perhaps, on a trike.
There are also a number of photographs with Kurdish themes in the collection – many more than Turkish ones. The ARF photo archives reflect a turbulent time in the 1920s and 1930s after the Genocide and the establishment of the USSR and the Republic of Turkey, when Kurdish and Armenian groups collaborated in armed movements. The most significant such uprising was the Ararat Rebellion in the late 1920s, led by the Khoyboun (Xoybûn) party. Below are two of its members.
ARF Photo Archives – Box 10, Photo 47
Ardashes Mouradian, in the picture below, was an ARF agent within that group. He went by Zeynal or Ziylan Bey, and was eventually abducted across the border into the USSR and probably killed on the orders of the Soviet leadership.
ARF Photo Archives – Box 6, Photo 169
Sheikh Mahmoud Barzanji also features in a couple of photographs in the collection.
ARF Photo Archives – Box 10, Photo 37
He was a Kurdish leader in uprisings against British rule in the north of newly-established Iraq in the 1920s. It is not clearly marked in the images, however, what the Armenian or specifically ARF connection might have been with his activities.
This series of brief articles is meant above all to invite you to visit arfarchives.org/photograph. Click around on the website. You might find a fascinating page from your family history or see directly the ups and downs of the Armenian nation in the last hundred-plus years.